Marc Angenot and Nadia Khouri

An International Bibliography of Prehistoric Fiction*

There appeared from 1860 to our day, in practically all the European cultures and in the US, hundreds of narratives that one may loosely group under the label "prehistoric fiction." Their superficial traits seem to be easily recognizable: these tales center around characters belonging to prehistory, and they relate events occurring in periods preceding recorded history, in those eras referred to collectively as the Stone Age, or those identified by the first palaeontologists as the Age of the Reindeer, or that of the Mammoth, or else in the Tertiary Era, since a number of scientists confidently assigned the origin of man to such pristine times.

Chronologically, the earliest books of prehistoric fiction appeared first in France. Nevertheless, the phenomenon seems to have spread before the end of the 19th century to countries like England, the US, and Germany. The emergence of the genre in English is associated with the names of Stanley Waterloo. H.G. Wells, Louis P. Gratacap. Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. William Golding's The Inheritors (1955) stands as a contemporary avatar of a literary type widely represented in English for over a century.

From the point of view of the sociology of literature, it is striking to find. at the very outset, groups of "specialists," i.e. writers who almost exclusively excelled in prehistoric fiction. Some of the most popular were people like Vardis A. Fisher and Richard Tooker in the US, Rosny the Elder in France, Ray Nyst in Belgium, Franz Achermann and Hans Friedrich Blunck in Germany. Yet, the most widely translated and read in all the Germanic languages was undoubtedly the Danish writer Johannes V. Jensen (Nobel Prize winner in 1944), author of a gigantic prehistoric saga. Den lange Rejse (The Long Journey). In the USSR we find some variants of the genre, notably in the 1920s, with Vladimir Obruchev, who combines the prehistoric theme with that of the hollow earth, a para-scientific conjecture mushrooming in other SF and utopian narratives throughout the 19th century. Some prehistoric fiction was also produced in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy and possibly elsewhere.

One narrative formula that was widely utilized in the writing of such fiction was that of the lost world: a crew of modern explorers discover a society of "living fossils" in the center of the Earth, in a secluded valley, or an isolated plateau. The archetype here is Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912). A more recent instance would be Les animaux dénaturés by Vercors (1952).

This category of prehistoric fiction belongs to the much broader and more significant spectrum of what we term "ape-man tales." These are narratives that relate either the regression of man to a simian mode of living or the mutation of an ape, transformed by science, into a sort of degraded copy of man. These tales make up a category combining a diversity of interrelated narrative formulae: simian societies, hominized apes (by education, scientific manipulation, crossbreeding, or mutation), simian men (through a mode of living, or a regressive type of evolution, through atavism, or again through scientific manipulations such as the grafting of a human brain to the body of an anthropoid). In any case, the simian world seems to represent a grotesque distortion of some utopian commonplaces: a literal "monkey-antic" of a perfect and rational state where, quite ambiguously, apes may exhibit a certain type of exemplary wisdom.

The odd fact concerning these narratives about ambiguous humanoids is that they appeared much earlier than the Darwinian dispute and the polemics on the simian genesis of man. Fiction here had indeed preceded scientific statements, as though the social imagination had intuitively apprehended  with unease and embarrassment, yet always with fascination  man as a "successful" monkey, or else the ape as an unfortunate cousin of man. No matter what power religious authority may have exerted in curbing some of the most audacious assertions about the origins of man, fiction still remained the field where almost anything could be safely asserted, without being attacked for systematizing scientific beliefs. Thus the French popularizer Pierre Boitard produced his Paris avant les hommes (ca. 1859) well before the emergence of human palaeontology. This book, written for a teenage public and offered as a prize to proficient schoolboys, contains a fanciful description of the ape-like ancestor of the modern Parisian. This "knowledge" which was already there before science actually institutionalized and normalized it, opens up an important question regarding the role of fiction within the history of ideas. Furthermore, the simian origin of man had already been narrated in the guise of satirical conjecture as far back as the 18th century.

This preliminary interpretation of prehistoric fiction as a compound of ancient beliefs, fantasies, literary conventions, and scientific debates has led us to approach such fiction not in terms of these generic constants inherent in the narratives themselves, but rather in terms of the genre as an intertextual apparatus. By this, we mean that a genre is not only a set of immanent literary features, but also a sort of selective machine which attracts, distorts, magnifies, rejects, and amalgamates a number of ideological vectors disseminated across the wide expanse of social discourse. Thus we find prehistoric fiction impregnated with a variety of "ideologemes": the discourse of 19th-century palaeoanthropology, which is itself heavily laden with a number of ideological biases; the Darwinian debate and its vulgarized offshoots; Social Darwinism, or rather  under this falsely synthetic label  a hodge-podge of pseudo-socialist or reactionary speculations, where the influences of Malthus, Spencer, Nietzsche, and Marx often form some disturbing combinations; fin-de siècle social psychology, drawing on those hegemonic concepts of "heredity," "atavism," "degeneration"; and racial anthropology as it became institutionally established roughly since 1850 and its meanders in the irrational genealogies of the myth of Aryan superiority, reinforced by the selective formalizations of the comparative linguistics of Indo-Germanic languages.

The discourse of Aryan anthropology, according to which "the eternal race struggle" is conceived of as the great "law of history,"1 offers a narrative nucleus to which are linked by affinity several concepts with an intense power of suggestion: that of "ancestral influences" in psychology, the biological justification of struggle and warfare, the ideology of linear progress, etc. The "classical" prehistoric romance  in the 19th and early 20th centuries  constantly reactivates the same minimal story: the emergence of a leader coupled with the progress of a tribe. One gifted individual, distinct from the horde, masters a means of survival by force or cunning (i.e., force combined with a primitive form of intelligence) and thereby contributes to increased collective security. The tribe, investing in him its biological instinct for survival, recognizes him as its leader. The narrative is thus suitably constructed on the leitmotif of: nature, horde, soil, territory, instinct, atavism, blood, survival, danger, destiny, fight, alliance, chief, race. The literary dramatization succeeds in restoring their "primitive innocence" to these ideological signs. Nature has its laws, and its raw beauty is anterior to any moral judgment. "Man's struggle against a hostile environment: such is life."2 It is from this endless yet finally blessed struggle that civilization evolves. In a genre like this, where destruction and survival are constantly intermingled, the quest for racial superiority is the major imperative. The story oscillates between two thematic poles: its displays the beauty of instinct, but implies the necessity of progress; it can evoke without any restraints rape, murder, cannibalism, laughter in the face of death, etc., although the uncanniness of such scenes provides an ambiguous estrangement. The obsession of "atavistic memory" reminds us of the fact that the simian brute still survives in each of us. This kind of discourse thus tries to awaken in the reader the fear of the alien, the instinct of ethnic safety, the dangers of miscegenation; but these regressive elements are compensated for by a claim for technical and moral progress, precisely as bourgeois optimism had conceived it.

Beyond these themes supposedly borrowed from positive science, ape-man tales may reactivate a number of archetypes, such as the myth of the ape as grotesque "reflection" of man, which runs through Western ape-lore practically from Antiquity3; or the myth of the Noble Savage juxtaposed, more or less, to the image of antediluvian man.

In this brief introduction we cannot elaborate on the full significance of "intertextual analysis," on its principles, or on its possible results as far as prehistoric fiction is concerned. The present bibliography, however, is part of a systematic inquiry into the emergence of human palaeontology on the one hand, and into the history of prehistoric fiction and anthropological SF on the other.4

As an attempt at an international compilation of works belonging to the genre, the following catalogue is divided into three parts: (1) an alphabetical (by author) list of prehistoric tales, strictly speaking, marked as (PR) at the end of every entry. We have included in this first section prehistoric lost world tales, identified as (LW). Every entry contains: a bibliographical description of the first edition; occasionally, data on a previous publication in a periodical: and information about the English translations of foreign texts; (2) a chronological listing of the same titles; and (3) an appended bibliography of related genres and narrative formulae: tales featuring simian societies, hominized apes, simianized men, "Darwinian" experiments. and so on.

Not recorded are: (1) popularizations of science, even if they include some narrative passages; (2) fiction based on axioms that are totally alien to human palaeontology, such as crypto-religious tales about the Garden of Eden or parascientific speculations about the extra-terrestrial origin of mankind; (3) all other forms of the lost-world subgenre, such as fiction about the engulfed Atlantis or pre-Columbian America. By the same token, hollow-earth narratives are included only if they contain stories of missing-link fossils living in the centre of the earth; (4) proto-historic romances (in which Bronze Age civilizations, Celts, Assyrians, etc. figure) or barbaric uchronias of heroic fantasy such as Howard's Conan sagas; (5) post-catastrophe tales with a relapse to primitive modes of existence; and (6) pseudo-evolutionist anticipations of beings that are to supersede Homo sapiens.

Chester, William L. Hawk of the Wilderness. NY: Harper, 1936. (Tarzania, incl. some prehistoric data) [1st publ. Blue Book Magazine, Oct. 1935; followed by: Kioga of the Wilderness. One against the Wilderness. Kioga of the Unknown Land (1938).]

______. "The Strength of the Strong," The Strength of the Strong. NY: Macmillan 1908. 257pp. [Also in: Moon-face and other Stories, 1919 and after (not in 1906 version), and in several editions of The Call of the Wild, from 1926 on.]

His Royal Highness Mammoth Martinet (pseud.) The Gorilla Origin of Man: or, the Darwin Theory of Development Confirmed from Recent Travels in the New World called Myn-me-ae-nia, or Gossipland. London: Farah, 1871. 168pp. (Simian society. Allegorical satire)

*This bibliography is part of a research project on prehistory and prehistoric fiction, a project funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant No. S.76-1306).